#FrontlineToTheFrontRow started like most ideas do for advertising creatives, while working on a brief, daydreaming. This time, it was on a COVID-19 brief back in March. We had a review with our ECD coming up, when I thought, “It’d be nice if we got BRAND NAME to reserve front row seats and let their fans nominate frontline staff to sit in them.” I quickly opened up Keynote and wrote a short insight/idea slide, before showing it to Matt Williams, my fabulous art director at the time. He liked it, and together we crafted the slide for our upcoming review.  

When it was time for our review, #FrontlineToTheFrontRow was maybe the third or fourth idea in our deck. We were big fans, and it wasn’t ANOTHER manifesto film, but some other ideas were a bit closer to the original brief. Our gut feeling was right. The ECD picked our first three ideas, but despite liking Frontline, he didn’t think the client would buy it. So, off we went to further develop our three other ideas.

Soon after that, we started to work remotely. Soon after that, our freelance contracts ended due to COVID. And there I was, like most other freelancers, jobless in April.

Attention grabbing

With an influx of time on my hands and Frontline to the Front Row still on my mind, I had a crazy thought, “Why not just try make Frontline happen by myself?”

My first thought was to send it to Nils Leonard at Uncommon. We follow each other on Twitter, so I slid into his DMs. *Ah, the beauty of Twitter* He liked the idea and agreed to run it by ITV, but due to COVID they couldn’t get any heat behind it.

Next, I did what anyone with a solid 690 Twitter followers would do; I tweeted at random celebrities, like Ricky Gervais and Lebron James. In short, that didn’t work. But it did get the attention of my mate, Gooch Richards, another freelance creative, who also lost his job due to COVID. We had previously collaborated on a project, so he asked to see what the idea was. I sent it to him, and he immediately got on-board.

Firstly, he suggested that we needed to visualise the idea better than my one-page idea slide. He was 100% correct. That’s when we recruited Tina Nguyen, Huey Wong and Pete Majarich to help us make a deck. Despite working across three different time zones, London, Sydney and Hong Kong, it was easy to arrange our first Zoom call and get going.

A balancing act

For the next three weeks, we explored different looks and feels for Frontline, which turned out to be a bit of a balancing act. Tina and Huey had full-time jobs, and Pete was about to become a dad, so we didn’t want to waste their time, or burn them out, with endless rounds of feedback, but at the same time we wanted to make sure that the deck was the best it could be. In the end, we got there, and then it was up to Gooch and me to make it happen.

Again, we turned to Twitter. I ended up sliding into Joe Mackay-Sinclair’s DM’s; he’s the founder of the Romans, the UK’s PR agency of the year. To our delight, Joe was quick to get back to us, and soon we were all on a Zoom call.

He agreed to share our deck with his team and see if any of them would volunteer their time to help us get Frontline started. The next day, he got back to us with the news that seven people had signed up, including a former FA employee. We were excited, to say the least.

We all agreed that while it wasn’t the right time to launch Frontline, it’d make sense for the agency to start a dialogue with the FA. Over the next couple of weeks, we waited on news from The Romans, checking-in every now and then to see if there had been any sort of development. Finally, we heard back from Joe. They managed to present the idea to someone at the FA, who wanted to explore combining it with something they were doing together with the NHS. After that, the trail went cold.

Looking further afield

Next, I turned to LinkedIn and started connecting with CMO’s of top American sports teams/leagues. They had previously collaborated with 72 & Sunny to create The Real Heroes Project, so I figured that they might be up for being a part of Frontline. I was wrong, but some of them did take the time to read my messages and get back to me.

A couple of weeks after that, I saw that the Super Rugby League in New Zealand was kicking-off in front of fans again. That’s when I emailed our pitch deck to all the teams, using their info@TeamName addresses. I knew it was a long shot, but what did we have to lose? We didn’t hear back from any teams for about two weeks, when suddenly the Auckland Blues got in touch with me. They liked the idea and wanted to be a part of it.

We were pumped. The only problem was that we didn’t have any assets. That’s when we turned to Richard Gray and Rhys Edwards to help us out. They’re two London-based art directors, which allowed us to feedback on the work much faster, instead of having to wait eight hours until Tina or Huey were awake.

In a matter of days, we created all the assets and built a simple webpage, which we sent to the Blues. About one week later, their first social post went live. All of our hard work paid off; it felt great. Having the Blues on-board gave us renewed energy, and so we emailed all the Super Rugby teams again with the news that the Blues are doing it. It worked. The Highlanders, Hurricanes and Chiefs all agreed to be a part of it and ended up giving away dozens of tickets.

In total, #FrontlineToTheFrontRow was live across the Super Rugby league for about five weeks, until New Zealand had to close down again. Ever since, Frontline has been paused. But we haven’t stopped emailing and connecting with people on LinkedIn. In fact, we’ve already heard back from four AFL teams in Australia, who’d like to be a part of it when their season kicks-off in 2021.

We’ve also gotten a very positive response from a CMO for an American Sports League in London. So, fingers crossed. The campaign is open to anyone who wants to be a part of it, from airlines to bands. If there’s a front row seat, why not have a frontline worker sit in it?